Guest editor of the issue – Dmitry Omelchenko

This issue of the journal is an attempt to sum up the experience of visual sociologists, anthropologists and other interdisciplinary experts working in social, humanitarian and creative fields, seeking solutions for academic topics via visual tools: photography, cinema, drawing. This is an uncommon effort among Russian scientific journals to demonstrate how to integrate images into text and vice versa in order to discribe and visualize how urban space is formed in the eyes of residents, how attachment to an urban location is expressed through creativity and a personalized spectrum, how the experience of living is transmitted, how academic knowledge is reflected through new and rarely used retransmission formats.

Visual anthropology and sociology pose a complex task for researchers - to make the invisible visible, not only to describe, but also to demonstrate which words are spoken, what meanings are attached. Visual study “is based on the idea that valid scientific insight in society can be acquired by observing, analyzing, and theorizing its visual manifestations: behavior of people and material products of culture" (Powels 2015).

Of course, there is a danger of crossing the fine line separating visual sciences and popular creativity and starting to think culturally, to start to burry onself in the theories of how and why we look at this particular person, and why we choose this optics (with or without quotation marks), this lighting, and look at this particular micro/macro society? Why are we in this particular city, how significant is the creative element in our analysis, and what determines the use of the chosen representational tool or analytical tool - film, photography, or drawing? Yes, we take risks - and we like it.

You can send us theoretical articles (up to 1.5 author's sheet), descriptions of applied cases (up to 1.5 author's sheet), field and archival materials with comments (from 1 page to 1 author's sheet), as well as interviews, research essays, book and conference reviews, static and moving images accompanying the research text, research sketches and notes, observation drawings, documentary projects dedicated to the anthropology and sociology of the city, visualization of the city through human observation tools and/or expression of the city itself through the image of a person.

We are waiting for proposals of texts until January 11, 2025. Please send finished articles and materials to ufa-ion@ranepa.ru by March 1, 2025. After the articles are discussed by the editorial board, they will be sent for external review.

Recommendations for authors and formating rules: https://ufajournal.ranepa.ru/for-authors